As electronic warfare prevades battlefields, Israeli firm is thinking smaller with anti-jam tech

JERUSALEM — As modern militaries confront increasingly electronic warfare-saturated battlefields, an Israeli defense firm says it sees an opening in providing anti-jam capabilities to increasingly small platforms like drones and, eventually, GPS-guided munitions themselves to “make smart munitions smart again.”

“You can get a small, handheld jammer on a random Chinese website that can kill GPS signals for hundreds of meters or take down UAVs from kilometers away,” Omer Sharar, cofounder and CEO of infiniDome, told Breaking Defense in a recent interview. “That is the jamming threat. It is like in cyber with a denial-of-service attack. When you flick the switch on, nothing has a GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite Systems] signal.”

Beyond jamming, there’s also spoofing, the tactic of feeding false location and navigation information into a platform — a tactic that often spills out beyond the battlefield.

After Israeli military operations began in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack, “we had this problem on a daily basis. There isn’t one Israeli who didn’t have a questionable experience [with their GPS location] showing up in Cairo or Amman or Beirut airports due to spoofing. It can happen in a blunt way throwing you off track by tens or thousands of kilometers; or it can be delicate, drifting your positioning, which is more dangerous because it’s harder to recognize,” Sharar said.

“The fact is that [some GNSS] signals are incredibly weak,” he said. “By the point they are received on earth by an iPhone or autonomous vehicle, they are as weak as a 20-Watt lightbulb in California trying to receive it in New York. … Because the signals are weak, it is easy to disrupt them.”

Sharar said that Israeli forces discovered issues with jamming during military operations in response to Hamas’s attack, not because of Hamas’s capabilities but because of the Israel Defense Force’s own. “The biggest problem we had in Israel was not ‘red’ jamming from the enemy, but it was ‘blue’ by the IDF.”

There are, of course, countermeasures. Defense firms the world over are developing navigation systems that don’t rely on satellite navigation, whether by using AI to aide in visual or gravitational navigation or even returning to wire-guided missiles. Larger airborne systems, like category five drones for example, also carry tech that harden the link to satellite navigation systems.

“The more you pay, the better backup to GPS you have. It’s just backup. [But] as a function of time though you start losing where you are,” Sharar said.

But as modern militaries rely more and more on electronic warfare, they’re also relying more on small drones — down to quadcopters and FPV drone — platforms that Sharar suggested generally aren’t capable of carrying much jamming tech. That’s where he said infiniDome comes in.

“We use a technology called ‘null steering.’ … It has been on large anti-jamming solutions on [US] Department of Defense or [Israel’s Directorate of Defense, Research and Development], and they are big and expensive and protect helicopters and fighter jets and battleships when weight and size and power consumption and price don’t matter.”

InfiniDome, he said, is “building a module that sits like a filter between the receiver and antennas. We don’t need special antennas or receivers. Whatever GPS receiver you are using, disconnect the antenna and connect to our box … we combine with antennas to get a new receiving pattern,” all meant for small platforms.

The company is looking smaller too, to tech that can fit on 155mm artillery munitions, the kind used so much in the Ukraine conflict that it’s created a global shortage.

“If you look at Excalibur, the GPS-guided munition, it had 90 percent accuracy,” Shara said, “but now in Ukraine that has dropped to five to 10 percent accuracy. … So we want to make smart munitions smart again.”

GNSS denial or manipulation is a problem for modern militaries that Sharar said isn’t going away, and has prompted demand for ways to combat it around the world.

“We see huge traction in India and Europe. We had success with Indian military trials and in eastern and northern Europe. Everyone is waking up,” he said. “Everyone knew about it. It became a reality. It became a painful reality.”